Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story:
Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee).
The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokmål. School textbooks would be rewritten with only the new grammar. Sometimes with comical results, as rhyming words in children’s would no lenger rhyme («Mons er pen./ Han er ren -> rein.»)
The attempt ultimately failed, and in 1972 Språknemda became Språkrådet (The language council), who maintain the official rules for written Norwegian and who published this article. Merging the two written languages was part of the council’s long term goals until 2002, when it was removed from its mandate.
What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism: When the phone number length increased from 5 to 6 digits, the number of wrongly dialed numbers increased along with it. Internal research at the bureau showed that people would make fewer errors when digits were consistently read from right to left.
> This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism
I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today.
But this reminds me of the fact that in Czech we have both counting systems as well. The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used informally as well (it also has a certain poetic quality).
Learning German was for me a revelation of how much influence German had on the Czech language. There are of course loanwords (mostly in the dying dialects), but there's also a less obvious structural influence.
My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen" - it has several meanings (physically put sth. forward, introduce, present, imagine). It turns out Czech has a fully native word (not a loanword) "představit" with an identical set of meanings and identical structure - "vor" is "před", "stellen" is "stavit". There are many words like that, and the counting system is likely another such "structural" influence.
I'm fully convinced that German is easier to learn for Czech speakers as opposed to English speakers, even though it's across language families. It's a language continuum after all ...
It was a different time as well. There was one central resource for phone-related things and the spirit of the time was very much a bureaucratic efficient one. The idea was that you could make the society better and more efficient, often top down. In Sweden there was even a standardisation of kitchens made by a government agency. Everything from height of the counters to placement. It wasn't always followed, but it did shape things. This was done at a time when the Swedish population hade a staggering increase in housing standards due mostly to government policy. The houses might not be very highly regarded today (mostly because the areas are considered bad) but they are solidly built and are usually very practical with lots of storage in the right places.
In Sweden we had the "du"-reform where we stopped referring to people either by their title or surname and the plural-you ("ni"). Instead we started using singular you ("du") and first name. This was started at a government agency and spread quickly through society.
There was actually a gender neutral pronoun introduced recently that is getting used more often. In addition to "han" and "hon" (he and she) we now have "hen". Depending on language situation it is actually very handy, and you can actually see it used in large newspapers or semi-official documents.
The standardization of kitchens (to optimize the housewife's day, based on observations) also lead to the hilarious black comedy “Psalmer från köket” (English title “Kitchen stories”) where the premise is that the government tries to repeat the success for single males. Who are considerably less amenable to having a researcher sit high up on a perch to write down their every move :-)
What people don't remember about the plural-you reform, is that neither "du" nor "ni" were used very much. Instead, "Han" (he) and "Hon" (she) were used to address people of similar standing.
> The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used informally as well (it also has a certain poetic quality).
English also had the backward numbers, but they are only used poetically nowadays. [1] is a nursery rhyme. [2] says English switched in the 16th century. (Except 13-19, which are still backwards.)
English also used to count in twenties ("three score and five" = 65), like modern Danish ("femogtres") which is clearer if written in slightly old Danish "femogtresindstyve", "fem og tre-sinds-tyve" → "five and three-times-twenty".
I've had the exact same reasoning about Polish, and after I've moved to Germany I've noticed that quite often I'm able to just translate a phrase directly from Polish and it would be correct. I suppose that the verbs originate in the convoluted language of German bureaucracy in the parts of Poland under German rule.
> My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen"
What makes you think this is an example of an infuence of German over Czech, rather than a common verb construction mechanism across indo-european languages?
Russian (and probably other slavic languages) has представить, which is virtually the same but in cyrillic, French/English has introduire/introduce (from latin intro [into] and ducere [drive, lead]), etc.
In general, modern Czech owes a significant fraction of its vocabulary to a certain Josef Jungmann, who published a big thesaurus about 180 years ago and "borrowed" new words into the up-to-that-time somewhat archaic language. Sometimes directly so, especially from other Slavic languages, sometimes via a calque from German/Latin/French etc.
Thus, sloka (stanza) is from Sanskrit, vzduch (air) from Russian, okres (county/region) from Polish, zeměpis (geography) a calque from Ancient Greek, and duchapřítomný (quick-witted) a calque from German geistesgegenwärtig.
I am not sure if vorstellen / představit is his calque as well.
Some structural similarities can be explained by contact but other similarities are indications of common origin. Indeed both Germanic languages and Slavic languages share a common ancestor: proto-indo-european.
"Present" also shares a similar etymology; from latin: prae (before) + esse (be), with a similar palette of meanings as the Germanic and Slavic forms
The similarities I have in mind are specific to German - Czech/Slavic. Like I don't know the English equivalent to "vorstellen" which would encompass all its meanings the same way as the Czech equivalent does. (though it is possible there is some archaic form which fell out of use)
the problem with the english equivalent is that while "present" does originate ultimately from latin, it came there through a very tortuous path so it lost a lot of meanings along the way.
> I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today.
A modern analogue might be to straighten out all the dual meanings and complicated grammar of modern English, in order for machine learning systems to more reliably parse spoken or written language.
The numbers switch was slow, though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger.
(If anyone here wonders if this is the same "Samnorsk" as in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep": It is. For people who know Norwegian, Vinge's books have several Norwegian-inspired terms. E.g. "Nyjora" is "new earth".)
I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.
I mean, there are many other vestigial pieces that will hang in there for a very long time, but see elsewhere - I searched the National Library, and you're absolutely right that it's still around to a limited extent, but the decline in written use at least has been fairly steep.
The failed samnorsk reform did have a silver lining.
Around high school I figured out that because of it, a shocking amount of Nynorsk grammar was secretly optional and the Bokmål version was very often valid Nynorsk.
So I started just writing my essays in Bokmål and then fixing the errors in post, so to speak. Initially my teacher tried to fail me for this, but she lost that battle.
I vehemently hate Nynorsk, or at least the fact that it's supposed to be "equal" to bokmål. It was a neat idea and all, but I honestly think it should only be seen as an archaic language used for poetry and literature. And only taught to students who want to delve deeper into that, not forced onto you starting in 8th grade.
I used the same approach! I essentially had a list of everything I should search and replace in the document (e.g. search for singular nouns ending in -en and see if they should be replaced by -a), and all the weird quirks that I needed to pay special attention to. As soon I was finished writing in bokmål, I followed the steps to "transpile" the text into nynorsk! I was able to go from almost failing to getting a decent grade back in the days using this approach.
That's small time. Back in my day, like 15 years ago, there was an on-machine bokmål to nynorsk translation program, named Nyno31, if I remember correctly. It wasn't great, but it would secure you a C with zero effort. Teachers weren't in the know, so there was almost no risk of getting caught.
That makes me so angry. The Norwegian school system is so, so inflexible and it ruins many lives each year.
For me, the reason I was never allowed to set foot in a university was German, PE, and Norwegian literature. I was suffering from severe health issues and I didn't have the energy to do all the subjects I had no interest in. So I poured my focus into the subjects I enjoyed and/or were relevant to my future plans(biology, calc, English, physics, history). I generally nailed those subjects. But because I failed German, and almost never showed up for PE, I was denied the opportunity to follow my dream and study biology.
Part of the problem is also the very inflexible admission requirements for Norwegian universities.
You could always apply for a programme Bsc and or Msc in Biology at a university in Australia. There are even agents throughout Europe who set you up with a proper application and assist in this. They get a kickback when you are admitted.
Hard sciences degrees were really hard to get into in Norway too. Some times the best way to win is by not playing their game.
That's probably the way to go, yeah. But that was never an option for me economically. But absolutely, if anyone reading this is a Norwegian teenager in a similar situation to mine, the above is excellent advice if you have the means.
I am however lucky in that I taught myself programming since I was 14, so by the time they kicked me out of HS, I was capable of doing it professionally. But it took me years of networking to get to the point of even getting interviews for such jobs without having a HS degree. I did eventually get to where I can find somewhat intellectually rewarding work for a few months a year, when I'm healthy enough to do so. Whenever I try to do more I always crash and burn, so now I just try to work little as possible to stay sane.
Education seems a bit more flexible in Sweden, i.e. I failed my third modern language but still managed to get in to uni by taking other courses. Over all I think you describe the tribulations of us all even if we manage to do all the hoops through uni. I worked during high school and military service, but looking back I was not really ready for it.
I think the right to left should be left to right in that last sentence? I was briefly confused by that and ended up reading your links (takk!)
Danish still use a somewhat complex infix system for reading numbers (five and half fours is 75), and I find that very confusing as a Swede who didn’t grow up with it.
Confusingly, Danish counting is also a mix of old norse counting systems (based on tens) and medieval ones (based on twenty) for maximum chaos. For instance the word for 40, fyrretyve (sounds like four-twenty), is derived from old norse fyritiughu, "four tens". It sounds like it SHOULD mean 80! But 80 is firs, or firsindstyve - four twenties.
It's half of the fourth twenty — meaning all of the first, second and third twenties, but only half of the fourth one. 20 + 20 + 20 + ½×20 = 70.
And for the 75, it's just "five and" before all that.
Many native Danish speakers learn the abbreviated words as young children, and don't generally think about their numbers this way, if they're even aware of it. (Much as a native English speaker might not think of 'thirteen' as 'three-ten'.)
For 60 and 80, the normal, abbreviated form is very short: "tres" and "firs" (full form: "tresindstyve", "firsindstyve"). For foreigners, these sound rather like something to do with three and four — as they are! — which causes much more difficulty than expected when learning basic numbers.
I think of it slightly differently, but it's basically the same:
In many germanic languages we say half-four when the time is half past three, where brits these days sometimes say half-three, to make it maximally confusing. I.e. we have an implied "half [to]" and they "half [past]".
This way of counting is what the Danes do. "Half-four times twenty" is "a half before four, times twenty" is "3.5 x 20" is 70 is "halvfjerdsindtyve" is "halvfjerds".
But it is only confusing to think of it that way, to speak Danish you have to just learn it as an opaque pointer to 70, or you'll get stuck doing mental arithmetic every time they say a number.
"The danish lanuage has collapsed" i.e. Kameloso is a foux shibboleth among my friends. I envy the danes they have a great shibboleth since no one can understand nor pronounce it anything of it.
I wish for a bigger revolution in Swedish. It has been rather painful to experience how hard it is for my children to learn to do simple addition in their heads because the language is broken.
It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs "<special word> and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a special word.
We should change 10, 20, 30, 40 to "etti, tvåti, treti, fyrti". It would be so much better!
For some reason many languages use an irregular system for numbers. Well, reasons are historical.. things may have made more sense in (e.g.) Old Norse than modern Danish, for example.
Japanese though.. now that's regular. One, two, three, .. nine, ten, ten-one, ten-two,.. ten-eight, ten-nine, two-ten, two-ten-one.. and so on. And then 'hundred', and continue the same way. to-hundred-to-ten-five (225). The only stumble is when you pass 10000, as from then on the grouping is in tens of thousands, not in thousands. But with that the only issue there's only one struggle to master (for learners coming from a culture which groups in thousands).
Anecdotally, Japanese children learn to do arithmetic quicker than children from (e.g.) Sweden. But I've been unable to find real scientific confirmation of this.
Counters are a different story than numbers. The numbers are highly regular, with the tiny exception that numbers 4 and 7 technically have two variants, where in certain areas one is preferred more than the other, and the pronunciation of 9 when talking about time. But that's really minor.
As soon as you're starting to count it's different.
Not being decimal is not the issue. The irregularity are special rules for certain numbers or ranges of numbers for which another pattern has to be used.
That's in the "counter" or ordinal number area. Numbers themselves are extremely regular: 20 is just "to-ten". The age of twenty is considered a very special occasion in Japan, and celebrated semi-publically (20 used to be when you became a legal adult, but now you can at least vote when you're 18). Thus that event is called hatachi, はたち, and is from the traditional number / counting system ("hata"=20). But it is also possible to say it as you would say 19 or 21, which is the normal number plus a "year counter" suffix - that depends on the focus.
The numbers (as in one, two, three..) are actually generally from Chinese, with exceptions (particularly where there are two options, as for four and seven), but counters (for smaller values) are generally from native Japanese and therefore sound different from numbers, and also changes somewhat with whatever it is you're counting. Japanese is so logical and well-structured that it appears that to compensate for that ease, you have counters.. (though we could blame Chinese for that as well, pre-contact there were only a very limited number of counter types (counter types are flat items, round items, long thin items, people, years..), post-contact there are hundreds (but fortunately it's possible to ignore a lot of them).
Thanks for the explanation. Yes, there are exceptions, but they really don't seem to be such a big deal. Chinese is even more regular. Only three classifiers and 兩 vs. 二 are confusing at first.
Japanese does have two different words for seven though. なな for everything that is not related to telling time, and しち when you're referring to units of time.
But this is a welcome trade for the regularity and simplicity of the rest of the number system. Although the flexibility available in European languages as described elsewhere in this thread does allow for texturizing things in a poetic or evocative way. being able to get two or three jobs done with one set of words is sometimes nice even if it does make things complicated when all you want is the most common usage of those words.
My Danish grandpa used to mock our Norwegian numbers (who is he to speak, with the Danish number system being completely wack, heh), by saying toti-en, toti-to etc as 21, 22, because he found it funny that we had a different word for 20 than for the other tens.
That's more or less how it works in English too... is it really that bad? Spanish and French also have special words for the teens, it's quite common in Europe and I've never heard of it being that difficult to learn.
Some languages have it much worse... I think Hindi is pretty irregular up to 100 .
English has special words until twelve. Until nineteen it follows a pattern. The few exceptions to that pattern also apply to the multiples of ten. twelve-twenty, thirteen-thirty, fifteen-fifty, and that's it. It could be much, much worse.
The "official" way of pronouncing numbers was indeed changed for that reason (NB: That was back when there were still phone central operators and you were supposed to tell them the number)
However - the "old" way ("two and forty") is alive and well, very much so by the oldest generation of course, but among much younger people too. Most people alive use both ways - for some stuff it's simply more natural or easier to say "fem-og-tredve" than "tretti-fem".
> What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”).
Yet almost every single person I speak with every day here outside of people from the Oslo region say it the "two and forty" way.
Though, that probably still means most people say it the "forty two" way.
> Already around 1830, shortly after Norway’s separation from Denmark, there grew an uncertainty as to what to call the language. Some preferred Danish, just as most American nationals called their language English. Others insisted on Norwegian, just as some Americans preferred American; this usage, however, caused sharp reactions from some Danish circles.
Reminds me of other countries: Austrians (I think) have settled on calling their language "German" (which it is, of course). In Moldova, the question of whether to call the language "Romanian" (supported by those who want closer ties to Romania) or "Moldavian" (supported by those who favor independence or closer ties to Russia) has become a pretty divisive issue.
As a student of Bokmål (for immigration and integration), Nynorsk is an ongoing mystery to me.
I think that I'm still at the A level (A1/A2). My auditory processing disorder adds an extra variable that I'm still learning how to work with as an adult. If anyone (in Norway) knows of someone who has or is interested in APD (https://www.statped.no/horsel/andre-utfordringer/auditive-pr...), please reach out to me.
Anyways, always happy to see Norwegian related news in HN.
Had a remote meeting with someone from Finland today. She speaks a bit Swedish, so I speak Norwegian and we can understand each other. Then today some other Norwegian joined in on the meeting, but she's from western Norway with a heavy dialect, and we had to switch to English for everyone to understand each other, heh.
Nynorsk isn't so bad once you get used to Bokmål. When I come across it in writing, it just seems like everything is spelled wrong. (am an immigrant as well)
It won't be such a mystery forever - at least not for reading. I struggle with many of the dialects down there (but then again... I'm listening to folks around Trondheim and I know others think that dialect is weird, too)
I'm in my 50s now and emigrated, but as a Norwegian child growing up in Oslo/Fredrikstad (both bokmål districts) I absolutely loathed the forced Nynorsk classes in the 80s/early 90s.
It absolutely felt as a political box ticking exercise, and a complete waste of time - I readily observed that people were struggling enough with bokmål as it was.
Never had a single use for it after leaving school.
As for the dialects, 100% agree
- they are very very different indeed.
A fun and relevant challenge would be to read some works by Jon Fosse, who was the recent Nobel Prize winner. He writes in Nynorsk. It's just different at a reading level (writing it is different, since there are some different grammar rules with it.)
For an easier challenge, there's the comic artist Jens K. Styve, who makes a newspaper comic ("Dunce") good enough that even the national newspapers didn't mind that it was in Nynorsk.
The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English.
Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know they have to keep it strong.
What makes it more interesting is that the non-phonetic, semi-ideographic nature of the writing system means no direct unambiguous translation between sound and written symbols—so that you may actually struggle to write down certain turns of spoken Cantonese, even if you are a native speaker!
Another difference is that, unlike Nynorsk (which began as “New Norwegian”), Cantonese is old—at least on par with or arguably older compared to languages used for writing in the same area.
In addition to what vidarh said - it's not comparable to Mandarin vs Cantonese, as those are spoken languages. Nynorsk is one way of writing (and reading) Norwegian, it is not a spoken form (nor is Bokmål). Some dialects are kind of closer if you try to "speak" it (read out loud, from e.g. a book), and some are farther away, most dialects contain elements where some words will fit better in one form and other elements fit better in the other form. But even grammar is often different in spoken Norwegian (and spoken Norwegian is just a huge continuum of dialects, which, if you don't stop, stretch across the borders to Sweden and Denmark too).
Sweden, Norway and Denmark is a perfect example of language continuum. At the fringes, the division between them is clearly for political and administrative purposes. It called all have been named "Danish".
I think what goes for "German" has even more internal differences.
You can write Cantonese, although most Cantonese speakers' "formal" written language is more closely related to spoken Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) than to the way they normally speak.
I recommend "Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular" by Don Snow.
How well people speaking different dialects understand one another?
Is there some "common dialect" that everybody uses with speakers of dialect different from their own?
What TV presenters use? Or nation-scale politicians?
I know nothing about it except what is in the article, and the article characterizes Nynorsk as “cultural elite language”—it looks like the article is not accurate?
That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…
A small cultural elite within its own user base likes to thumb their nose at Bokmål, but the proportion of the population who uses Nynorsk is only 10%. The vast majority of the "cultural elite" of Norway as a whole uses Bokmål. There are perhaps some small subsets where it might punch above its weight relative to the total number of users, and I think that is what the article is hinting at. E.g. we have had perhaps more prominent authors who use Nynorsk than the proportion of Nynorsk users might have made you expect.
But conversely, you'll if anything be more likely to find people with negative attitudes to Nynorsk, with at least some proportion of people who resent having to deal with a language only used by 10%.
The comparison is a bit flawed since there is no dialect continuum between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and there might have never been one.
A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used.
People write Cantonese in private of course, but that usage is not uniform at all since there is a lot of slang (especially swearing words) for which more than one popular way to write it down exists. Quite often the characters chosen for that purpose had different meanings originally. Some particularly novel or distinctive words and idioms are even partly written in Latin letters, like 快-D.
> A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form
Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.
> People write Cantonese in private of course
It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas!
> that usage is not uniform
Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn’t know offhand how they would even do it about a purely spoken turn of phrase.
> Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.
A government regulating it by teaching it in school and actively using it in public would be a strong criteria. Alternatively, an established body of literature that serves as a model (that's how written Italian evolved).
> It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas
Yes, that's also what I said. However, any official announcements or documents are quite unlikely to use it.
Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct?
My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spoken language.
Nynorsk and Bokmål are both _written_ forms only. Norwegian spoken language is a huge continuum of dialects - there's no official spoken Norwegian (unlike e.g. Swedish, where something called "rikssvensk" was introduced by the authorities - "national spoken Swedish").
What you will find though is that there are a couple of scenarios where people will kind of speak the written form. One is, or at least used to be, newscasters on TV. They used to have rules which limited the kind of speech used, for reasons. And, as the news were essentially read from a script.. you speak it like it's written. Be that Bokmål or Nynorsk. And that's where you will find spoken Bokmål (or Nynorsk).. when reading aloud. And, as I mentioned in another comment.. when teaching people Norwegian. In the beginning you kind of speak the written form, otherwise the student would be totally confused.
If they were solely written languages then you wouldn’t be able to, for example, read the text aloud, right?
I don’t have any first-hand knowledge, but according to Wikipedia on Bokmål it looks like it can be spoken as well (Wikipedia uses a phrase “spoken Bokmål”), but without a universally agreed-upon and regulated pronunciation. Isn’t it similar to English in this sense?
Bokmål and Nynorsk are both systems designed as a common form of writing. None of them were ever meant to be a spoken language - they are "best effort" of trying to make a unified way of writing. That doesn't mean that it's not possible to "speak" them, as in e.g. reading aloud (though the intonation and pronunciation may still wary wildly depending on the speaker's actual dialect).
I think you're misunderstanding a bit. Those are both written languages only, but some may speak closer to one than the other. My speaking would be pretty close to bokmål, as I have "no" dialect.
Nynorsk is a mix of lots of various spoken dialects. No one really "speaks" nynorsk, but for many it's closer to how they speak than bokmål would be, but it's still not 1:1 for them. The only way you really would "speak" nynorsk if you're reading a play or something written in it.
That almost certainly means "a moderate Oslo dialect, neither Stovner or Frogner", and it's probably not nearly as close to written Bokmål as you think (unless you learned Norwegian as a second language).
As I wrote in another comment[0]: Foreign parents, and most kids spoke like Oslo among other kids, and their dialect only with adults. So pretty plain Norwegian. Most people would however guess I'm from Østfold, due to a thick "L" I've no idea where I picked up high here in the mountains.
Nynorsk was an attempt at creating a written language closer to the spoken language. The problem is that in Norway out dialects are widely different. For example, the phrase "I am" is written as "Jeg er" in bokmål, "Eg er" in nynorsk. Nobody says "Jeg" - it can be pronounced as "Jei", "Eg", "Æ", or even "Oss" though that's a different word that some dialects use in place of the "correct" one.
Yeah. Secretly it's actually just written Sunnmøre dialect with a bunch arcane and archaic vocabulary words from around the country thrown in, that if they're used, everyone else has to google.
That's why I hate reading it so much. I swear every time i read an article or something in Nynorsk, there's at least one word in there I've never seen in my life, that sounds like something a Sunnmøring spat out during a stroke.
But that word is the first example that you don't actually pronounce bokmål the way it's written: Yes, some say "Ye" and some say "Eeg", but no one pronounces it "Yeeg" except maybe foreigners reading from a text.
Nynorsk, or "New Norwegian", is really just used by a people on the south-western part of Norway. Other than that, it is merely a formality.
You'll have to take the obligatory classes in Jr. HS and HS, but that's it for most people.
A certain percentage of texts published by state agencies have to be in Nynorsk. The vast majority of Norwegians will never use it.
We also have two other languages used here - Sámi, which is the language of the Sámi people - the indigenous people in Norway, and Kven, which is used by Kven people. A Finnish dialect/language use by a small number of people in Northern Norway. That is why you can sometimes see three different signs when traveling up North (example: https://gfx.nrk.no/zDih8cbMibUfJJo4xiPqRQvkcy07eBhmSISFaS0Sc... )
EDIT: And if you travel far enough north-east, to Kirkenes, you will also find some Russian/Cyrillic signs
The reason Nynorsk isn't so widespread is because it's been under attack, for the obvious reasons and in the obvious ways you'd expect a lower prestige/more rural language to be under attack. It used to be the norm in a lot of places you might not have expected, such as most of Trøndelag (Olav Duun, anyone?).
I think it's a bit of a double standard to praise the Sami language and lament the fact that most Sami stopped speaking it to their children a couple of generations ago, and yet cheer on the death of Nynorsk.
Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago.
As for Nynorsk - it was more common in the past. My mother had Nynorsk as main writing language, and she's from Senja (in the north). That wasn't really a bad choice. It's not entirely similar to how she spoke (but parts of it was), but then again Bokmål is also vastly different from how she spoke. It's compromises and problems whatever you do. For myself, when I write (I write bokmål) it's just a different language. I write completely differently from how I speak, both for vocabulary and to a certain extent grammar.
Nynorsk is a perfectly fine written language. After I came over my hatred for it (which was 100% caused by my teacher in middle school) I've learned to appreciate it for what it is. Whatever you say about Bokmål it isn't exactly poetic.
As vintermann said - there's no evidence for any group arriving earlier than any others. We know that the "Norwegian" population in modern Norway are a mix of the original European population and the Yamnaya and others, we don't know exactly when that population overtook the earlier one (what's certain is that people who lived along certain parts of the coast 11k-12k years ago didn't have any Yamnaya connection, obviously).
We don't really know much, except that the Sami languages haven't diverged enough from related languages elsewhere for them to have been there that long ago. The Sami came much later than the post-glacial original population. When the ancestors of modern Norwegian and Sami groups (and others) arrived we simply don't know for certain.
If you look at the very oldest writings you'll find that there were a great many different groups of people in Norway, including in the far north-east, and there was trade. That lasted all the way up to the arrival of Christianity, after that this (if related, or just a coincidence) became more of a "take, don't trade" business.
Maybe opening a can of worms here, but no... actually they/we didn't.
19th century scholars were happy to declare that the Sami were the original inhabitants of the north, but that had more with the fact that they preferred seeing themselves as the superior, colonizing culture, than with archeological and linguistic evidence. Being a native was not cool at all. It was awkward for these scholars to become gradually aware of Sami's relationship to Hungarian and languages from further east, and even more such things as the -anger names core Sami areas Porsanger, Varanger, Malangen etc.
Angr is a proto-Nordic word that means bay. -Angr names are common all over Norway. We know that the word went out of use before 800 though, because around that time Icleand got settled, and there are no -angr names in Iceland.
There are even proto-Norse words preserved in Sami place names such as Máhkarávju - Avju is a proto-Nordic/proto-Germanic word for island. Máhkarávju is quite clearly related to the modern Norwegian name for the island, Magerøya, but that means they must have borrowed the name more than thousand years ago.
It may seem that the many proto-Norse borrowings in Sami may come from that in at least some parts of the country some of the time, it wasn't Norse culture and language that supplanted the Sami, but vice versa! Very awkward for scholars who would rather stake their nationalistic claims on manifest destiny than being first.
Now, Sami activists say any of this doesn't matter, because the Sami were a minority people with their own established culture and languages who were around when the formal borders of Norway were drawn up (as late as 1750 in Finnmark). And that's the ILO 169 definition.
This is completely true. It's also true that Sami activists were actively involved in writing that definition so that it would include them. I totally respect why they did that piece of lobbying work - the Sami certainly have legitimate interest to defend, and for that purpose being classed with native Americans is much more useful than to be seen as just another quarrelsome European linguistic minority like Welsh, Basque or Catalan people - or, say, people who use Nynorsk! (just see the hate they get in this very thread).
I didn't know that about the loan words, super interesting. I will read up on this topic. One thing I do know is that when adding genetic studies, it's also very complicated. The now Sami population at some point adopted a finno-ugric language. It wasn't only migration. (By the way the ILO 169 definition makes a lot of sense to me, because if you create a state entity, you now also have responsibilities towards the governed.)
There are hundreds of loanwords (e.g. a University of Oslo article "NAMN OG NEMNE 37 – 2020" (Nynorsk, except for the introduction)), though it's rather complicated. That particular article includes discussion about a word which was thought to be borrowed from proto-Norse, but probably isn't, though it seems to not be proto-Sami either. Well, enough of that, what I wanted to add was that (which is mentioned in the same article), re the claim: "The now Sami population at some point adopted a finno-ugric language. It wasn't only migration.".
This seems to be about the hypothesis that what is now the Sami population were residents who originally spoke a different language and simply adopted proto-Sami from someone. That hypothesis is pretty much abandoned as extremely unlikely. Instead, the people who spoke proto-Sami moved in from elsewhere, as did the proto-north-west-Germanic speaking people.
I learned Bokmål Norwegian through my Norwegian friends, and they spoke and wrote to me in it consistently, while some of their patients would use heavy dialect that I didn’t understand at first and was shocked how different it sounded.
Hva for noe - sounded as “Ka fo noka” from her mom, shouting through the house, to inquire on something…
I think you meant "parents" not patients - I was a bit confused at first :-)
What happened to you is probably that your friends, for your sake, tried to "speak" Bokmål to you (Bokmål is a written, not normally spoken language), as in practice that's how you have to teach Norwegian to foreigners. You have to come up with something where the writing and the speech actually matches. Where my wife was taught they did it that way - a teacher explained to me that it was their only choice, even if it's awkward. And (as told to me by foreign co-workers who did that program) followed by a shock when they've learned "Norwegian" and find out that the people around them speak totally differently, with different grammar even!
So yes, I also spoke a kind of "bokmål"-rinsed Norwegian to my wife when we were just switching to speaking Norwegian. But now I don't. It was a bit weird (had to remember to change the word order now and then, in addition to vocabulary), but I got used to it. It's also a trap though, if you keep up "sanitizing" the language for too long the other party (the one who's learning Norwegian) will not learn enough real vocabulary and may way too long be unable to understand random old people from the district visiting town. Which is something you need to do if you're working in a shop, say.
I'm from a dialect speaking part of Norway (Hallingdal), and my peers and I would speak like Oslo (so closer to bokmål) together. But they would always speak in dialect with teachers, their parents etc. My parents are foreigners, so I then never picked up on speaking the dialect myself. But it's still a shock to have a conversation with them, and how they suddenly switch when picking up the phone or whatever.
Not entirely sure why they switch. Was it to "be cool" with friends? Or to suck it a bit up to authority figures?
I never change my dialect when I travel in Norway, for any reason, as long as the one I'm speaking to is native. But some people are extremely sensitive to how others speak, and may unconsciously (and some consciously) try to mimic the one they're speaking with.
In the past though there was some discrimination going on. In Oslo you could find advertisements for apartments, for example, with the text "no northeners please". That's only sixty-seventy years back. People moving to Oslo from elsewhere would then try to change their dialect. Despicable times. Before my time though. There's nothing of that anymore, or, if there are any individuals around who actually thinks one dialect has more prestige than another.. the vast majority will ignore them, just as they ignore other morons (for lack of a better word)
Such a tantalizing article... come on, where are the examples? It's like reading a description of a painting without being shown a picture! What are some of these vulgar urban words that the Riksmål elites didn't want their children to be taught? What are some of these rural dialectal words that were kept optional but fell out of even moderate Nynorsk? More than a few readers of a chapter-length history of the Norwegian language might have some familiarity with Scandinavian, and the rest of us can handle a few words in italics!
Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.
Most Norwegian you will encounter in such contexts is almost certainly Bokmål; a rule of thumb is that you are pretty unlikely to encounter Nynorsk unless you are actually in Norway itself, or consuming a lot of Norwegian media.
Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school)
These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.
My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago.
Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.
It's important to note that "Bokmål" and "Nynorsk" are only written forms of the language, and depending on where you grow up the dialect of Norwegian you speak will be closer to "Bokmål" or "Nynorsk".
If I remember correctly from Norwegian classes growing up, Bokmål is heavily influenced by written Danish. Nynorsk was based on dialects people spoke outside of the bigger cities. Nynorsk however is more of an amalgamation of dialects, and can not be said to be spoken by anyone. Your estimation is in the neighborhood of native writers of Nynorsk I believe.
There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.)
Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him.
Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now.
In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.
Again, it's not a dialect of bokmål. That would sound like bokmål is actually a spoken language and there are dialects of it. It is not. It's the other way around - bokmål is an attempt to create a written language with common elements for a lot of people, and the same was done for nynorsk - it's just that for bokmål the selection was more from certain city areas in the south, and nynorsk more from dialects elsewhere, but that's actually a too easy description. In my own dialect, which originates very far from where bokmål was created, there are tons of similarities but also tons of differences, and the same can be said for just about every dialect.
When teaching Norwegian to foreigners there's really only one practical way of doing that - use an artificial "spoken" bokmål so that the students can actually match speech to written words. That's just a crutch in order to learn the language (after you're done the real learning starts). That doesn't mean that "spoken" bokmål (or nynorsk for that matter) is real outside the learning institution.
Oh, they have many languages with smaller text corpora than Nynorsk, and they're not exploiting language similarity very well.
Probably they had that one Norwegian employee who struggled with it in school and came to hate it as a result (you'll find plenty of them in this thread).
You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article.
But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then.
So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing.
What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.)
Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.
Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just enter the digits as they are spoken and not wait for the next word. In any case, as it's an original feature of Norwegian (Danish has its own variety of course.. with its own quirks) it's still fairly alive and well among a large patch of Norwegians.
Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection.
I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time.
The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve"
* 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits
* 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes)
* 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform)
(the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread)
vs. "trettifem":
* 2000-2024: 2587
* 1950-1999: 5728
* 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform)
(You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)
In writing, I totally agree - even though I will speak the reversed form often, I don't use that in writing. If I for some reason aren't writing the actual numbers (22) I will write "tjueto", not "to-og-tjue" even if that's what I would say. It's extremely rare to see reverse notation in writing.
It does to Dutch ears too. Just a few weeks ago, I passed through some tourist-infested area in Amsterdam. "Are these Swedish tourists drunk at this hour in morning already? Oh, wait, they are sober Danes."
Does it? Now I wonder what Alemannic (Swiss-German, maybe especially the heavier dialects like Bernese and Walliserdeutsch) sound to you, because to my Bernese ears, Dutch sounds a lot closer to my own language than pretty much all other germanic languages.
Languages are fascinating, I always try to learn few words in any language just for the fun of it and to see the sparkling eyes when I say these words in front of the native speakers, they appreciate that you learned some of their languages, except English, people get hostile if you don’t even speak the local accent.
Neither. Almost all Norwegians understand English, and automated translations of single words without the surrounding context are so shitty it becomes hard to understand without mentally translating back to English.
Edit to add: see also the "postcode file" post about Windows 11 from a few months back.
this energetic overview necessarily blurs a lot of distinctions when describing the changes in population and language over time. The Vikings (aka pirates) were a dominant form for a very long time, with care going to ferocity and travel skills, not fancy verb forms or leather bound books. It was literally larger and larger Feudal associations that led to merging into this kingdom or that kingdom, and not everyone was in great agreement.
"The King has been baptised so all the citizens are now Christian" happened many times. Along with Christianity came fancy verb forms and leather bound books. It is not a complete story the way it is told in this article, which implies that one Kingdom turned into another one.. not tribal raiding groups merging for military protection, and bringing Christianity in for international political purposes.
"even today the spoken language in Norway can vary quite a lot" - well, "duh".. it is local groups maintaining their local identity..
The article here restates history from the modern view - everyone is in a Country, and that Country has such a language and writing. I stopped reading and wrote this when the discussion of the "dominant Latins" said some clumsy and misrepresentative thing. Latin (and French)_knowledge was not widespread at all.. so how is it "dominant" ? It is because of the international military trade and treaties that came with it.. local people may or may not have a lot to do with that.
source: Conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity , Masters thesis by some lowly grad student; various Wikipedia.. never got further North than Copenhagen..
I don't think you understand the extent of the variety of differences in spoken Norwegian. This is geographic in nature as most of the west coast is rock walls of varying height perpendicular to their emergence from the sea. This has led to isolated communities that continue to be isolated in various regards even to this day.
Of the very little Norwegian that I speak, I do so in the Vestlandet dialect, meaning I would pronounce "I am going to church" (Nynorsk: "Eg skal i kyrkja", bokmal: "Jeg skal i kirken") as "eg", "skaw" "e" "kerken", whereas in Oslo they would say "yai" "skaw" "e" "shirken". And this doesn't cover Bergensk, whatever is going on in Stavanger, Haugesund, et al!
FWIW, my mother is from Austevoll, my American sister married someone from Austevoll and moved to Bergen and technically Norwegian was my first language, at least before the age of three.
I can barely understand anyone from Eastern Norway! It sounds like sing-songy Swedish to me. I can follow most of a conversation in the Vestlandet dialect. A few ($15 at the grocers) beers in and I'll even try to speak it myself!
For context, my elderly mother grew up in a coastal village that was inaccessible to the rest of the country except by boat! (A tunnel has long since been dynamited through the mountain and the village is now well connected with the rest of the country)
There's an entire coastal dialect that runs up and down parts of the country where those people's dialect is closer to each other's than it is to their neighbors just a few miles inland.
Yep. Living near the sea means access. In three weeks you could go all the way from Bergen to Lofoten by sail. As soon as you set foot on land.. no access. Before roads and tunnels. Even recently.. the book "Three in Norway, by two of them" from 1881 was written by a couple of British guys (they were three, but two wrote the book) going to Jotunheimen for fishing and hunting. They left by ship from Newcastle and arrived in Oslo (today's name) after just two days, but going from Oslo to (at the map, "nearby") Lillehammer took three whole weeks. With support from locals and guides and there was even a road at the time.
My grandfather, who lived at the coast, could meet people up and down the coastline as much as he wished. But there could be people living just a few kilometers away, as the crow flies, who he would never meet.. because there was a mountain in between.
Thus, dialects along the coast have much more in common with each other for much longer distances than inland dialects which can vary greatly even over relatively short distances.
A lot of my genealogy is significantly helped by considering if possible ancestors were in plausible walking vs. boating distance. You then need to prove connections, of course, but quickly ruling candidates out because they'd have lived days of walking through mountains apart even though it "looks close" today has saved a lot of wasted time.
Wow! You have preserved the dative case. "i kerken" instead of "i kerka". Dative is AFAIK not part of any standard Scandinavian language, but remains in some dialects. Steadily losing ground, though.
I don’t think it’s anything to do with case, just that the gender of the word is different between the dialects. ‘en’ or ‘a’ is just a suffix meaning ‘the’.
I'm not sure about that particular dialect, if it's case or not, but it's a fact that some dialects do keep the dative (though it's been disappearing somewhat recently). In addition to certain country-wide expressions which have kept old case forms, like "gå mann av huse", and "i live" (being alive), though I've recently seen so-called "journalists" in newspapers being unable to understand it and writing "i livet" instead, which has a totally different meaning.
It is certainly possible that a word may differ in gender between dialects. But the way dative is normally expressed in Norwegian dialects is that masculine words get the normal feminine ending and feminine words get the masculine one.
Oh right, I didn’t know that! I still don’t imagine that’s what is happening in this case; there are just plenty more feminine nouns in Nynorsk and similar dialects.
It's even more complicated. I grew up north east of Oslo, but speak close to western Oslo dialect with some now pretty-conservative Bokmål use (to the point where your rendition of Oslo-dialect is entirely different to how I speak - e.g. I prominently pronounce the "l" in "skal" and my pronunciation of "kirken" has nothing resembling any "sh-" sound), partly due to my dad, partly because I grew up reading a lot of old books.
At school we had an exchange student from Germany one year who quickly learnt to speak the local dialect, not too far from your rendition of Oslo dialect, but more -a endings, e.g. "kirka" rather than "kirken", but she struggled to understand me, because of those differences.
Those dialects are a 15 minute train ride apart.
People who grow up in Norway will understand multiple of these variants without necessarily being entirely aware of how different they can seem to foreigners, exacerbated by the fact we tone down the differences a lot in writing - in particular spoken Norwegian merges a lot of words. E.g. you can find people saying "skarru bli med?" ("are you coming?") while writing "skal du bli med?". But even those speaking forms of Norwegian close to conservative Bokmål like me will have pauses that are surprisingly short between some words - e.g. I have a gap between "bli" and "med" in my example sentence, but it's short enough that it's not a given it's clear for non-native speakers that I'm saying two words.
And despite the destigmatisation of dialect use in recent decades, a lot of the spoken Norwegian dialects that today deviate from both Nynorsk and Bokmål are rarely written down except in dialogue in novels, and even then it's politics - it's more common for more radical Norwegian writers to write dialogue in dialects (ironically, several of the most radical older Norwegian writers promoted Riksmål / conservative Bokmål - e.g. Arnulf Øverland was both a member of the communist Mot Dag - "Towards Dawn - and a president of the Riksmåls-association), making it even harder for foreign learners to get exposure to them during study.
To your issue of understanding people from Eastern Norway, in a reversal I still recall an embarrassing moment on holiday in Denmark as a child. I mostly understood spoken Danish (the article is polite and say they sound "blurred", while the old common joke is that Danish sounds like Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth), but at one point some kid was trying to talk to me at the beach, and I apologised to him, telling him I didn't understand his Danish very well.
That afternoon I learned my mum had talked to his parents, and the family was Norwegian, from Bergen, and most certainly not speaking Danish. I wouldn't mistake those two today, but he spoke differently enough to me that as a child guessing he spoke Danish was not a big leap.
I grew up in a Norwegian ex-pat community in Houston, Texas, attending the local Norwegian language church there. The priest would get rotated out every few years, and I remember as a kid being fascinated by the roulette wheel of "which dialect is the next priest they send going to speak?"
> Those dialects are a 15 minute train ride apart.
This prompts questions on the linguistic fallout of infrastructural development.
Presumably the train line is more direct and faster than any previous land (or sea) connection. In what year was the train line built ? And, how far apart in travel time were the dialects before then ? And, has there perhaps been an academic study of the effect over time of the train line on the relationship between the dialects ?
The train has been there since 1854 - it's along the oldest rail line on Norway.
It'd certainly have been a long trek before then (a day maybe?), but I think a lot of the distinction there is also socioeconomic - the West Oslo dialect is very much associated with the wealthiest part of town and the wealthy suburbs, and where there certainly were expectations around what was long seen as more cultured and educated language.
The line is actually very sharp in Oslo between the Eastern and Western parts of the city, and that initial gap
is at least usually seen as socioeconomic , but the gap then gets even larger once you get further East and North.
I can't find anywhere where the article talks about Latin as dominant. It talks about the latin-using Catholic Church as having been the dominant church. The point being that with reformation came translated bibles, but Norway didn't get its own.
For the most part your comment is largely tangential to the article, where the rough sketch of older Norwegian history just sets the scene for why there was a growing conflict between spoken Norwegian and the imposed Danish written language, and the written language used by the church and the state were a large part of that - hence e.g
the still extant but increasingly meaningless term "Riksmål" ("state/national language") used for conservative Bokmål.
yes you are right.. I got big downvotes for the way I framed it, but the conversation is great! so many fluent speakers here .. I am reading this with interest
Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee).
The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokmål. School textbooks would be rewritten with only the new grammar. Sometimes with comical results, as rhyming words in children’s would no lenger rhyme («Mons er pen./ Han er ren -> rein.»)
The attempt ultimately failed, and in 1972 Språknemda became Språkrådet (The language council), who maintain the official rules for written Norwegian and who published this article. Merging the two written languages was part of the council’s long term goals until 2002, when it was removed from its mandate.
What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism: When the phone number length increased from 5 to 6 digits, the number of wrongly dialed numbers increased along with it. Internal research at the bureau showed that people would make fewer errors when digits were consistently read from right to left.
Further reading (in Norwegian): - https://snl.no/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten